Google Adds More Cloud Data Centers

The great cloud build-out continued Wednesday with news that Google is adding more cloud computing capacity available from in its Dalles, Oregon data center.

This is part of an already-announced expansion that will add 10 new cloud data center facilities through 2017, Brian Stevens, Google’s vice president of cloud platforms told Fortune in an interview.

The addition of Dalles capacity will reduce latency (or delay) 30% to 80% for some cloud customers, Stevens said.

Google (GOOG) cloud computing, storage, and networking services are now available from five sets of data centers worldwide.

That’s just the beginning though. Google Cloud Platform is taking on public cloud leader Amazon (AMZN) Web Services and Microsoft (MSFT) Azure in this booming market.

Pete Mastin, vice president of business development for Cedexis, a company that measures latency and other attributes of public clouds expects the great cloud data center build out to continue.

“Over time, cloud companies will see the performance advantages in having many instances spread out around the world as well as strong local peering so they can take advantage of local Internet Service Providers,” he noted. “Instances” is cloud speak for computer power. These instances refer to computer loads running on the cloud providers’ servers.

More is more, when it comes to public cloud computing—an IT model in which a single provider (in this case Google) aggregates and manages masses of servers, storage, and networking gear for use by many customers. While customers use these data centers to store data and run applications remotely, it behooves the providers to place that computing power as close to the customer as possible because distance adds latency, or delays to the process.

Google, which is newer to this game than pioneer Amazon Web Services and runner-up Microsoft Azure, has fewer cloud data centers than either of those incumbents. But, Stevens said the fact that Google owns and operates its own fiber optic networks as well as many smaller “points of presence” (POPs) that puts some computing power at the edges of the network mitigates that. But nonetheless the company is adding data center capacity.